Over at Daily Kos, the diarist Devilstower had a front-page post that captured the dilemma of our current over-reliance on automobiles and other motor vehicles. While all his points are good, and as James Howard Kunstler has pointed out, the Interstate Highway System was one of the greatest misallocation of resources in the history of the world, effective action can't be taken to correct things unless those who want change understand why we followed the path we did. We made our choices, as is usual, largely on the basis of our collective psyche. Our reasons were not totally rational, and activists who need to change things need to understand and appeal to, or somehow neutralize, the same irrational drives.
Edward Bernays, the nephew of Sigmund Freud, is considered to be the "father of public relations." In his 1928 book Propaganda (by which he meant "public relations"), he wrote the following:
It is chiefly the psychologists of the school of Freud who have pointed out that many of man's thoughts and actions are compensatory substitutes for desires which he has been obliged to suppress. A thing may be desired not for its intrinsic worth or usefulness, but because he has unconsciously come to see in it a symbol of something else, the desire for which he is ashamed to admit to himself. [emphasis mine] A man buying a car may think he wants it for purposes of locomotion, whereas the fact may be that he would really prefer not to be burdened with it, and would rather walk for the sake of his health. He may really want it because it is a symbol of social position, an evidence of his success in business, or a means of pleasing his wife.
This, in a nutshell, is our dilemma. But the reasons why a a car (or a suburban/exurban McMansion, for that matter) is such a powerful symbol run very deep in our history.
Let's start with our mobility and then we can move to were we finally end up when we're done traveling around. "Mobility" is the fetish word of the automotive industry. (Just check out the website of the Society of Automotive Engineers (SAE) or attend one of their meetings.) But to our subconscious, there are different levels of "mobility."
Michael Korda in his book Horse people observes:
-- In countless ways, the horse signifies rank, class, money, and has done so from the very beginning of history, separating the knight from the common foot soldier, the caballero from the peasant, the lordly plantation owner from the lowly dirt farmer, the glamorous cavalryman from the muddy infantryman. The horse stood, among other things, for social superiority, mobility, and not getting your feet wet and muddy like ordinary folk.
. . .
Those who had horses rode with their heads high above the common people, looking down on them, or later in carriages protected from the elements, with blinds you could pull down so you didn't have to look at them. The horse was for centuries the key factor for maintaining and establishing social distinctions, and horsemanship was the common bonding factor between the upper classes of almost every civilized nation and culture.
Let's be honest, public transit is nothing more than mechanized pedestrianism. And I say this from experience as a daily rider, often forced by crowds to spend most of my 2-hour commute in a standing position. And even when I sit, when I get off the bus or train, I have to walk to my final destination. No wonder our culture sees public transit as an "inferior good" mainly for the poor and otherwise disadvantaged. The auto made it easy for the masses to obtain the status of "equestrians." Lots of luck trying to convince the masses that they should give that up.
But there's more.
Autos are only part of the reason why we're "drowning in concrete." Another part is our collective national lust for living in "single family detached houses." If most people live that way, then building high-density compact towns and cities becomes impossible. the result is that not only do the masses rely on autos, they end up driving those autos long distances just to fulfill the requirements of their daily life. And people do insist on single-family homes. And such homes are not affordable any more in the close-in neighborhoods where walking and transit are practical and even if you drive, you don't drive very far. There's just not enough available land in those neighborhoods to build enough single-family houses. Supply and demand thus leads to the stratospheric real-estate prices you see when you go house hunting in places like San Fransisco, New York, Boston, Washington, DC, etc. Thus the homebuilders go further and further afield, 20, 30, 50 miles from town to build the new tracts of McMansions that homebuyers desire.
There's a reason why people lust for these McMansions. And it's part and parcel of the mass neurosis that's so effectively exploited by the real estate, automobile, and petroleum industry.
A good short introduction to the sources of the Anglo-Saxon lust for landed property can be found in Andro Linklater's Measuring America, which is purportedly about the US Land Survey and the development of our system of weights and measures (and also why we didn't adopt the metric system), but contains important background about the Anglo-American land-lust. In fact, the whole story of America is not necessarily about the spread of democracy, but rather the struggle for the wretched refuse of the teeming European shore to become miniaturized versions of European feudal lords. It is related, in equal parts, to the dislocation of the British masses as a result of the Enclosures during the period 1600 - 1800 and the availability of lots and lots of new land in the New World.
"A man's home is is castle" reverberates very strongly in the American psyche. In fact, the racist candidate George Mahoney used it the 1966 Maryland gubernatorial election that gave the world Spiro Agnew. It touched a powerful nerve in the American psyche, a nerve that continues today, where the highest ideal of American homeownership is as large a single-family detached house on as much land as possible. True, McMansions are often sited on postage-stamp sized lots, but them, these are cartoon symbols (as Kunstler would put it) of a manorial estate for the middle-class types who can't afford a real manor.
Again, lots of luck convincing the masses they should live in apartments. You might as well flat-out remind them that they are low-class peasants, always have been, always will be.
So this is our collective neurosis: We claim to support democracy where all are created equal, but deep down our heart's desire is to be a feudal lord. Most of us don't understand this inner struggle and are easy bait for marketers selling us the cheap symbols of upper-class identity represented by the single-family home and automobile. Thus we demand these almost as an entitlement even though for many of us neither the car nor the single-family detached home is actually practical for our current situation in life.
Any activist that wants to change our concrete-drowning ways needs to deal with this psychological barrier. Unfortunately, the status quo resonates very well with most of us, who lack the self-awareness to understand that sometimes the things we lust for aren't good for us. (I know that only too well with regard to diet!! :) ) True green politicians are going to have to figure out ways to shrink-talk the mass of voters into understanding what's really at stake.
As someone else has said, "Good night and good luck."
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